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Journal Article
Will the Tenth District catch the Asian flu?
While the impacts of the Asian financial turmoil on the United States have been widely discussed and studied, few analysts have looked at the likely impact on the Tenth District Economy. Gazel and Lamb examine the negative impacts of the Asian financial turmoil on the Tenth District and find that while the overall impact on the district economy is likely to be moderate, some segments of the economy could be hurt significantly. Two important sectors of the Tenth District economy likely to be affected by the Asian economic crisis are manufacturing and agriculture.> District manufacturing ...
Working Paper
Why are estimates of agricultural supply response so variable?
Estimates of the response of agricultural supply to movements in expected price display curiously large variation across crops, regions, and time periods. We argue that this anomaly may be traced, at least in part, to the statistical properties of the commonly-used econometric estimator, which has infinite moments of all orders and may have a bimodal distribution. We propose an alternative minimum-expected-loss estimator, establish its improved sampling properties, and argue for its usefulness in the empirical analysis of agricultural supply response.
Journal Article
U.S. agriculture : another solid year in 1998?
U.S. agriculture had a very good year in 1997, with profits widely shared among the nation's farmers. While few producers could boast of bell-ringer profits, as they did in 1996, nearly all could claim a good year. The year was especially welcome to the nation's cattle producers, who had struggled through an extended period of losses. The cattle industry rebounded much faster and further than anyone expected. While Mother Nature did bring major flooding to the Northern Plains states in late spring, most parts of the nation had good growing conditions in 1997. The result was an abundant ...
Journal Article
U.S. agriculture at the crossroads in 1999
Markets for U.S. farm products took a sudden, unexpected turn for the worse in 1998, as supply and demand factors combined to produce a plunge in crop prices. Most parts of the nation had very favorable growing conditions in 1998, resulting in an abundant harvest of the major crops, and pushing prices lower. Likewise, the supply of red meat products in the marketplace soared, as both beef and pork producers boosted production, with pork production hitting a record high. But as supply soared, demand weakened. In particular, the economic crisis in Asia led to a drop in ag exports to many Asian ...
Journal Article
From the Plains to the plate : can the beef industry regain market share?
Over the past several decades, the beef industry has seen a sharp drop in its share of the retail meat market. While per capita meat consumption has grown, per capita beef consumption has plunged. Explaining the drop in beef's market share has become a favorite pastime of industry analysts. In fact, a family feud of sorts has broken out in the industry between those who think the decline largely reflects increases in beef's price relative to competing meats and those who stress nonprice factors such as lifestyle changes, health concerns, and so forth as causes of decline. Regardless of the ...
Journal Article
Can U.S. oil production survive the 20th century?
The plunge in world oil prices has brought further difficulties to U.S. oil production, which has been declining in recent years. At the current low prices, most domestic oil wells are not profitable. This calls into question the long-run viability of oil production in the United States. Whether oil production remains a viable part of the U.S. economy in the next century will depend on how long oil prices remain at their current low levels.> Lamb and Wilkerson show how the recent low prices for oil on world markets reflect a combination of demand and supply effects, with both short-run and ...
Journal Article
How will the 1996 Farm Bill affect the outlook for District farmland values?
Farmland values in the states of the Tenth Federal Reserve District rose about 5.5 percent over the year ended June 30, 1997. Indeed, over the past two years prices in many parts of the country have risen sharply. The jump in farmland values comes at a time of dynamic change in the farm sector. Last year, the federal government enacted sweeping farm legislation that both lowers payments to producers and removes many government controls on farm production.> Government payments have been an important source of farm income for many years, and have likely been capitalized into farmland values. ...
Working Paper
Inverse productivity : land quality, labor markets, and risk
I test three explanations of the inverse productivity relationship using the ICRISAT data. I reject land quality differences as a cause of the inverse relationship between profits per hectare and farm size. I find that both labor-market imperfections and risk aversion may play a role in explaining the inverse productivity relationship. Smaller farmers use more labor per-hectare than larger farmers, although the relationship is ameliorated somewhat by considering land-quality effects. Risk aversion may cause smaller farmers to over-apply labor to production, but it also fails to fully explain ...
Working Paper
Off-farm labor supply and fertilizer use
I develop a two-period stochastic dynamic programming model to explain the interaction between fertilizer use and off-farm labor supply. Using a well-known sample of Indian farmers, I find that fertilizer use responds strongly to the village wage and that irrigation raises fertilizer use, while larger farmers use less fertilizer (per acre) than smaller ones. Response to one-sided production shocks, is stronger for female labor, indicating that it is more important for smoothing consumption than male labor.